Taliban Wage Deadly Attacks in Three Afghan Provinces --- KABUL, Afghanistan — On the first day of their “spring offensive,” the Taliban mounted attacks in three provinces that killed at least 11 people on Monday. In a fourth province, the families of two would-be suicide bombers turned them in to the police, helping to forestall what would have likely been another attack. -- The attacks were a reminder that as the last of the Western troops withdraw in the coming months, the Afghan forces will be in an unrelenting fight just to hold ground. And it raised the prospect of intensified violence in the coming weeks during the runoff phase of the Afghan presidential election, which the Taliban vowed to disrupt. -- In a report on the Taliban insurgency released Monday, the International Crisis Group forecast “escalating violence and insurgent attacks” after American and allied troops complete their withdrawal this year. -- The report noted that the Taliban had been able to muster larger forces, and that in some areas the insurgents and the Afghan security forces were inflicting nearly equal casualties on each other, in another suggestion of increased insurgent strength. -- One attack on Monday hit just as people were settling in to work at the Justice Ministry’s provincial offices in Jalalabad, according to people in the area. Three men wearing suicide vests and armed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades killed the two police guards at the building’s entrance and stormed in. -- In the course of the battle with the Afghan security forces, which lasted four to five hours, three civil servants were killed, along with a student and a third member of the security forces. The lasting effect of the attack will be felt for months, because a part of the building caught fire and the ministry’s paper records were reduced to ashes, said Col. Abdul Rafi Oruzgani, the head of Nangarhar Province’s police criminal division. -- The Taliban, in a statement they emailed to journalists announcing their spring offensive, said that only two fighters were involved in the Jalalabad attack, but the Afghan police said there were three. - More, NYTimes, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/13/world/asia/taliban-afghanistan.html?hp&_r=0